UESPWiki:Podcast/2 15

Daring Dungeoneers Dig Delves Welcome to the UESPodcast! Join your host Pylawn with guests baratron, AKB, and Alarra as we discuss the latest news and have a discussion on our thoughts on Dungeons throughout the Elder Scrolls.

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Show Notes

Roster

Host:

• Pylawn

Guests:

• Alarra
• baratron
• AKB

News

UESP:

• • Patreon now allows year memberships

ESO:

• Stonethorn Patch released!
  • https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/542612/pc-patch-notes-v6-1-5-stonethorn-update-27
  • Highlights:
    • New Dungeons
      • New Dungeons
      • Stone Garden: Deep within the caverns of Blackreach lies a secret laboratory where all manner of unspeakable research is performed. Arkasis, the mad alchemist in charge, tests new concoctions and experiments on both willing and unwilling subjects. What horrors lie within his Stone Garden and what does it mean for the Dark Heart of Skyrim?
      • Castle Thorn: Biding her time in her mountain stronghold, Lady Thorn has quietly built her forces for some nefarious means. Now, whispers and rumors in Western Skyrim point to a large host gathered at the castle, preparing to march to war … but to where and for what purpose?
    • Character Pathing in Housing
    • Server and Client optimization and stability
    • Lots of changes to item sets, item traits, and Mundus Stones.
      • Some of these changes are intended to improve performance by removing some of the need for the client and the server to synchronise state.
  • Some important points:
    • Seven new Solitude/Vampiric gold Furnishing Plans available from Rolis Hlaalu for 125 writ vouchers each (one for each trade skill). The Elsweyr ones have been reduced in price to 100 writ vouchers.
    • The Sea Giant Motif chapters can now be obtained from Kyne's Aegis weekly coffers. Not massively important if we don’t have time.
    • Pyre Watch and Icereach motif pages will be dropping less often from Normal versions of the dungeons.
    • Many more Antiquities bug fixes.
    • There’s a new Stamina morph for the Sorcerer Crystal Shard ability.
    • A LOT of changes to some class skills, particularly Nightblades.
    • The bug where the game decided you were still in Werewolf form and gave you a bounty should have now been fixed.
    • Vigor has swapped places with Rapid Maneuver in the PvP Assault skill tree. You will now get Vigor as soon as you’ve done (or skipped) the “Welcome to Cyrodiil” quests, but you need to be Rank 5 in Alliance War before you’ll get Rapid Maneuver.
      • This is to assist Stamina characters with healing.
    • Zanil Theran, the Luxury Furnisher, now has his own stall in the Hollow City.
    • Pylawn and baratron’s favourite Patch Note! Added a filter for "Included banked items" to the Deconstruct and Research tab at crafting stations. Finally you can make sure that you only deconstruct items in your inventory instead of the ones you’re saving for other characters!
• Really bad problems with Guild Trader flip on both PC servers. The main Guild info window ("G") is bugged for all guilds.
  • For guilds whose bids were successful, it shows that no trader was won today, however the trader kiosks have flipped and are usable.
  • For guilds whose bids were UNSUCCESSFUL... The Guild info window still shows last week's trader. Very worryingly, these guilds ALSO could not "Hire" an empty Guild Trader.
  • The only guilds whose Guild Info window are correct are those who didn’t have a trader last week and were able to “Hire” an open spot today.
  • ZOS confirmed via Twitter that they have received the reports and are looking into it.

Legends:

• Modern Gauntlet - Only sets Houses of Morrowind and newer
  • No Core, Heroes of Skyrim, Fall of the Dark Brotherhood, Return to Clockwork City, Madhouse Collection, Forgotten Hero Collection
• https://legends.bethesda.net/en/article/7fE9IcK1I9WcHX6wenbFBY/the-elder-scrolls-legends-august-2020-monthly-reward-card
  • Skooma Cat’s Whimsy, 1 cost Neutral Support: Your cards that didn’t start in your deck cost 1 less.

Call to Arms:

• Adventurer Allies delayed a little bit, but Adventurer Followers will be a bit early and both will be available for preorder this week.

Supporters

Patreon:

• Travis DeLong
• Sam Middleton
• Stacey
• Maxwell Perkins
• Ray Bennett (Annual)
• Heather Bernard (Annual)

Twitch Subs:

• chiboshvili123

iTunes:

• “I have been using the UESP wiki since I started playing Skyrim in 2011, so I was very excited to find this podcast. It’s worth watching them stream the podcast on stream, but if you can’t, then definitely check out this weekly podcast!”
  • pilotjimjones via Apple Podcasts · United States of America · 08/18/20

Wiki:

Scholarly Pursuits

I will ask our guests what they have been working on in the world of TES! This can be game play, wiki work, discord things, anything relevant to UESP/TES that you’ve been working on the past couple weeks / when you were last on the show.

• Pylawn
  • Lots of ESO again
    • Decided to make a couple new characters
      • A Nord Nightblade styled after Shor
      • A Wood Elf Warden to make a stam DPS dungeoneer
    • Running Cyrodiil on my stamsorc
    • Got super lost and confused with a friend in Craglorn Delves
  • Framed the Greymoor ESO map
• baratron
  • I reached the hilarious number of 1337 Champion Points. Unfortunately I then continued to gain EXP.
  • Ran the Imperial City dungeons on Veteran with new players. Interesting to see how much Veteran White-Gold Tower has been nerfed and how little Veteran Imperial City Prison has.
    • I just found some video files on my computer from June 2016 and I really want to compare those versions of Vet White-Gold Tower and Vet ICP to the current ones.
  • The UESP PC-NA Guild completed Veteran Kyne’s Aegis for the first time with a score of 42,670!
  • Had a MASSIVE FIGHT with the ESO client for the Stonethorn download. It kept throwing up error messages I’ve never seen before, and I’m sure I redownloaded the entire game twice.
    • I started the download at 6pm and got into the game just before 5am, and I have fast internet.
  • Otherwise, a whole lot of Animal Crossing. So much item trading with other people. So many spreadsheets.
• Alarra
  • Not a lot. Mostly playing RDR2 at the moment.
  • AKB
  • I don’t know where to begin!

Topic: Dungeons, Dungeons, DUNGEONS

Dungeons throughout The Elder Scrolls

What do the dungeons look like in each game?

Arena

• Isn’t it just one big dungeon?
• No.

Daggerfall

Morrowind

• Ancestral Tombs, Grottos, Mines, etc
• Where they tended to hide Daedric Artifacts and other important items

Oblivion

• Do Oblivion gates count? (Yes, though there are only 10 possible layouts for them, with the exception of Main Quest-related gates.)
• Ayleid Ruins, Caves, Forts, Mines. Places
• Oblivion dungeons are described as Small, Medium or Large based on the number of zones they contain:
  • Small: One zone
  • Medium: Two or three zones
  • Large: Four or more zones
• Dungeons could provide Daedric Artifacts needed for the Main Quest, or just for fun.
• Who could forget the giant, upside-down furniture in Arkved’s Tower?
• Or the long underwater section of Fathis Aren’s Tower?

Up to & including Oblivion, dungeons were designed to be completed by a single player alone, although a handful of quests had a temporary follower. (baratron had a save in which she picked up these quest followers and never turned the quests in, so she got followed around by several Kvatch guards before trading them in for Brother Martin and Jauffre, as well as Erthor, Mazoga, Guilbert and Reynald Jemane, and a creepy skinned dog from the Shivering Isles.)

In Skyrim, you can hire an NPC mercenary or take your housecarls into dungeons, which allows for slightly harder dungeon mechanics.

Skyrim

• Caves, Hideouts, Nordic Ruins, Dwarven Ruins etc. Even forts, maybe?
• Basically everywhere listed on Places which isn’t a City, Town, or Orc Stronghold.
• Pretty much everywhere you go to get a Word Wall which isn’t in the open.
• > 99% of Skyrim players must have completed Bleak Falls Barrow. (I bet it’s much less TBH) alright, >90%??
• Dungeons added by the Dawnguard and Dragonborn DLCs tend to be much longer than those in base-game Skyrim.
• baratron would like to mention Raven Rock Mine in Dragonborn which took her a full 5.5 hours to navigate, including two returns to the surface with a full inventory of items to deconstruct or sell.

ESO

• A big focus of the game itself.
• Has multiple types of dungeon.
  • Delves are intended to be completed by a single player and are typically less than 15 minutes long. They have one boss and usually one quest. They are incredibly linear and often just a loop.
    • They are not instanced, meaning that you may be in the dungeon with many players who you don’t know.
  • Public dungeons may be soloed or done in groups. Harder to solo - you require at minimum a self-heal ability, and they are easier if you have combat pets.
    • The groups don’t have to be formalised, players can follow each other without communicating.
    • 5-7 bosses including a Group Event, which these days can be soloed as well. 2 quests.
    • Bigger and more complicated than delves, and less linear. If a boss you need for the Achievement has been killed, you can carry on, and come back later.
  • Group dungeons are a private instance for up to 4 players who are in a formal group. The game intends for the roles to be 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 2 Damage Dealers, but if you are playing with friends and it’s an easier dungeon, you can run with 4 Damage Dealers if you really want.
    • Back to being fairly linear due to the story of the dungeon - you fight each boss in order.
  • Trials are technically dungeons, a private instance for up to 12 players in a formal group. Some ESO Trials have a choice of paths before the final boss (namely Asylum, Cloudrest, and Sunspire). The rest are linear.
  • Arenas are dungeons in terms of having many enemies to kill, but they have no exploration at all. ESO Arenas are either single-player (Maelstrom) or for 4 players (Dragonstar, Blackrose Prison).

Discussion about MMO dungeons vs Single Player Dungeons

Dungeons from the single-player games are akin to delves and Public Dungeons in ESO.

However the design of single-player dungeons is different - they can be MUCH less linear to encourage exploration. It’s actually a little depressing looking back at certain Oblivion dungeon maps and seeing how complex and labyrinthine the dungeons are, in comparison to the simple layout of ESO dungeons.

Single-player dungeons can also require players to pick up a key to open a door, or to find a hidden lever/switch to open another section of the map. This is very rarely done in ESO (I can’t speak for MMOs in general), even within the instanced dungeons. Usually in ESO, unlocking a later part of a dungeon is done by killing a boss rather than finding an item.

A massive difference is that single-player dungeons are generally intended to be completed once whereas MMO dungeons may be repeated many times. Also, dungeons from the earlier ES games are actually clearable:

• Oblivion dungeons reset after 3 days.
• Skyrim dungeons reset after 10 days, if you enter and start but don't clear, or 30 days if you get a full clear.

• ESO delves and Public Dungeons start to respawn again within minutes.
• ESO instanced dungeons (Group Dungeons and Trials) can be cleared, but as soon as you leave the instance, you can start again with a full population of enemies.

MMO dungeons generally require players to take on specific roles. In ESO, there are only three roles:

• Damage Dealers should be fairly self-explanatory.
• Healers heal the group, provide buffs for the group, and debuffs on enemies.
• Tanks keep bosses pointed away from squishy Damage Dealers, take the majority of their hits, heal themselves, and provide buffs/debuffs as above.

You have to build your character differently depending on which role you want to play, e.g. Tanks need to have a lot of Health and a lot of Armor.

How dungeons work in ESO, and how have they changed

Not exactly sure what you intended to put in here? Or is this where the business about delves vs public dungeons vs instanced dungeons is supposed to go?

Is the story important?

baratron thinks so. In fact the story and dialogue is one of the things which brings me back into some dungeons. Rilis XII in Banished Cells is hilariously evil as a boss, which makes him more fun to beat.

Pylawn thinks it depends on the player. For me story is important, but I also know a lot of people who play games “for the numbers” and couldn’t tell you the story of anything in the game.

See, I agree that whether the story is important depends on the player, but I ALSO think that the dungeons with the strongest stories/dialogue tend to have the most interesting boss mechanics as well. Am I biased? Maybe. -- baratron.

Favo(u)rite Dungeons?

Darkshade II - all of the bosses have interesting mechanics. I love how you have to switch up your build to avoid single-target attacks against Grobull the Transmuted, and how The Engine Guardian cannot be tanked - instead, all four players chase it around in a circle.

Crypt of Hearts II - I remember when this was hard, before everyone I ran with had face-melting DPS. Freeing people from Ruzozuzalpamaz’s cocoons was truly irritating, and Nerien’eth’s different modes were challenging - especially at 35% when he goes for his sword.

Ruins of Mazzatun - HEEM-JAS IS BEST ARGONIAN.

Interesting boss mechanics

Not exactly sure if we’re even going to get this far to be honest. And maybe it’s best suited for the Lore / Mechanics discussions that we were talking about having after finishing the Lore of the playable races.